Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#231

Post by ahussain »

hdjrudni wrote: post #211
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

Those are the same selling points as CSS-in-JSS libs like Styled Components. Or CSS Components. Except your last point about "low-level CSS styles" which I'd argue is a weak point. You really should learn the underlying CSS to gain mastery of it. Not arguing for one thing over another, just saying Tailwind really never had anything to offer me personally, but maybe if I wasn't already proficient in CSS and the other…

It’s more about cognitive load, and abstraction level. If you’re trying to make an object spin, it’s much easier to use the tailwind class than it is to remember css keyframes.

Sure, when debugging a complex issue, it’s worth knowing the low-level, but CSS is not a great abstraction for day-to-day work.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#232

Post by ahussain »

skybrian wrote: post #161
azangru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

Writing CSS manually was never all that pleasant for me, mostly the part about debugging it when it doesn't do what I want. So I tried Tailwind and it seemed to help. But now that Claude Opus 4.5 is writing all my code, it can write and debug CSS better than I can use Tailwind. So, CSS it is.

Claude can also write and debug tailwind for you! :)

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#233

Post by maple3142 »

zarzavat wrote: post #208
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

The point of CSS is specifically to separate styling and semantics, so that they are not tightly coupled. If you were writing a blog post you would want to be able to change the theme without going through every blog post you ever wrote, no? If I'm writing a React component I don't want it tightly coupled to its cosmetic appearance for the same reason. Styling is imposed on elements, intrinsic styles are bad and work…

I think the problem is simply that css is too restricted that you can style a fixed piece of html in any way you want. In practice, achieving some desired layout require changing the html structure. The missing layer would be something that can change the structure of html like js or xslt. In modern frontend development you already have data defined in some json, and html + css combined together is the presentation layer that can't really be separated.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#234

Post by seanwilson »

zarzavat wrote: post #208
ahussain wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

The point of CSS is specifically to separate styling and semantics, so that they are not tightly coupled. If you were writing a blog post you would want to be able to change the theme without going through every blog post you ever wrote, no? If I'm writing a React component I don't want it tightly coupled to its cosmetic appearance for the same reason. Styling is imposed on elements, intrinsic styles are bad and work…

Content should come from your database, Markdown, JSON, models etc.

Presentation is determined by the HTML and CSS together.

So your content and presentation is already separate enough to get the benefits. Breaking up the presentation layer further with premature abstractions spread over multiple files comes at a cost for little payback. I'm sure everyone has worked on sites where you're scared to make CSS file edits because the unpredictable ripple of changes might break unrelated pages.

Styling code near your semantic HTML tags doesn't get in the way, and they're highly related too so you want to iterate and review on them together.

I've never seen a complex website redesign that didn't involve almost gutting the HTML either. CSS isn't powerful enough alone and it's not worth the cost of jumping through hoops trying because it's rare sites need theme switchers. Even blog post themes for the same platform come with their own HTML instead of being CSS-only.

> If you were writing a blog post you would want to be able to change the theme without going through every blog post you ever wrote, no?

Tailwind sites often have a `prose` class specifically for styling post content in the traditional CSS way (especially if you're not in control of how the HTML was generated) and this is some of the simplest styling work. For complex UIs and branded elements though, the utility class approach scales much better.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#236

Post by sodapopcan »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

> killed Tailwind Labs

They are still around.

> "Give everything away for free and this people will leave technology"

This is more interesting, although somewhat generally understood (can be conflated with people seeing "free" and "cheap" and therefore undesirable). It depends on your definitely of longevity but we certainly have a LOT of free software that has, so far, lasted the test of time.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#237

Post by timcobb »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

> This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#238

Post by sodapopcan »

theropost wrote: post #24
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

I think there is a real issue here, but I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books. The bigger problem is incentives. We built a system where writing docs, tutorials, and open technical content paid off indirectly through traffic, subscriptions, or services. LLMs get a lot of value from that work, but they also break the loop that used to send value back to the people and comp…

It's not as simple as calling it theft, but it is simply theft, plus the other good points you made.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#239

Post by tshaddox »

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

That’s not at all why I bought Tailwind Plus. I bought it (at work) to have a solid collection of typical components and UI patterns, mostly expertly designed with a lot of attention to detail, to use as inspiration and as a shared language with other frontend devs and designers. I rarely (if ever) actually copy pasted any of their HTML or Tailwind styles. It’s mostly used as reference and inspiration. The fact that it’s implemented in Tailwind is mostly irrelevant (Tailwind really isn’t hard to use, especially after your first couple of small projects).

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#240

Post by paradite »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.

By your analogy human brains as also IP thefts, because they ingest what's available in the world, mix and match them, and synthesize slightly different IPs based on them.
Post reply on HN